YOUR CART

They moved over
the rice fields, notin flight
not
in murmurations
not moving
as one black body against
the wind, but in
the terrible
breaking of a dam
over the
Combahee River.
Women jostling babies, packets
of bread and fat,
grasping
chickens, holding
pots still
hot with rice,
men dragging pigs, shouldering
children, children running
on thin limbs
catching up or
being caught under,
where
alligators snapped,
bit
as the maw
of the shackle.
The sly
boats whistled, signaled:
we are here, you
seven hundred fifty-six, you
shall not be left
to the Confederacy.
Out front:
the General
watching for torpedoes,
Harriet
singing a hymn,
Moses,
parting
the waters.

AMANDA GUNN is the recipient of the 2014 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York. She lives and teaches in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is an MFA candidate and Owens Scholars Fellow in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Redivider, Southern Humanities Review, Thrush, New South, Weave Magazine, and Winter Tangerine Review.